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Subdomain hosted in a different country - what are the implications?

We are looking at creating an eCommerce section to a website and we are just weighing up the options:

Magento - host on hour own server - great but it can often be very slow when hosting a shared server.

Shopify - hosted solution but hosting is in the US and we are in the UK and shop will be hosted on a subdomain as a result

Build our own solution - time consuming and costly

There are two issues that have arisen from this situation....

Is it worse for SEO to host your store in a different country or to host in your country but your store potentially run slower?

I'm swaying to the side of the argument that says give your users a good and fast experience instead of worrying about where you host the store. Bearing in mind that the main website will be hosted in the UK anyway and it is just the subdomain that will be hosted in the US.

Just wondered if anybody has had experience with this or if I'm missing something?

Big BazzaSEO Guy at the end of a long corridoor in a small white room where no-one can hear me cry.

Jun 13, 2011

Host in your own country where possible (and practical) as server response time and server location are SEO factors - though not hugely weighted.

However, as .Coms are considered global hosting the US AND UK site on the same US server wouldn't be of huge detriment (in terms of server response time again.) - if you only want to run one site and split the visitors between /US and /UK subfolders. Remember, you can use Google Webmaster Tools to create Geographic targeting for each sub folder (One for the US sub folder/sub directory and one for the UK for example.)

In a perfect world however I would want to see the sites hosted in the appropriate country as this does help to indicate your target audience (and the obvious server response times I keep mentioning.) Google does allow for those that host out of their own country, hence the geographic targeting option in google webmaster tools.

I think UK users do like to see .Co.Uk at the end of the domain - because they know that generally means they will sell (and ship) to UK users - but we also use global .com stores if re-directed to them (Ebuyer.com for instance.)

- You can always use a .co.uk domain (if you have that too) for marketing only and redirect all traffic to your xyzdomain.com/UK sub folder.

In terms of the ecommerce software, I would (and did) opt for another ecommerce solution altogether:

Interspire Shopping Cart is very good in terms of SEO (The URL structure, H1 tags, meta title, meta description etc are dealt with very well. We rank number one for a variety of terms using this as the ecommerce solution. (Note this is self hosting) There is a hosted version that interspire are beginning to favour - see www.Bigcommerce.com

I agree with EGOL, a new hosting option may be best. But if cost is the issue then user-experience is the most important. Server locations may effect SEO, but conversion rate is more important for your business, therefore high bounce rates because of slow load speeds will have an adverse effect.

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